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TEDChris writes "The Allosphere, being created at UC Santa Barbara, is the most ambitious attempt yet at creating powerful 3d visualizations of raw scientific data, such as the structure of a crystal, or how quantum effects take place. Researchers watch from a bridge inside the 30-foot sphere, looking at data projected 360 degrees around them and listening to 3D sound. The first major public demo of the facility has just been posted at TED.com. Optimists would argue that many of the greatest scientific breakthroughs happened through a new visual way of imagining data. Penicillin and relativity come to mind. So this is either a killer new research vehicle, an incredible toy, or just an insanely expensive art project."

That's what I was thinking. They could just buy some very high density LCD's and pay one of the engineerign students to spend a few weeks rigging them up with a motion detector and headphones? Uses alot less space, power and you get true stereoscopic vision. You would also get many different viewpoints for more then one perspective on the same dataset. In short it looks impressive at first but becomes a colossal waste of when you really think about it.

The innovation isn't in the projection system - it is the fact that they are visualizing large amounts of data interactively in real-time, particularly volume rendering. Everything from the Schrodinger equations defining the probabilistic orbits of electrons to functional MRI directly from the scanner in real-time. It is easy to play a pre-recorded movie of a fMRI scan on a number of large monitors, but they want to visualize more complex information such as what effect the increased demand on blood flow ha

Really? From what I recall, penicillin was discovered by noticing that mould contaminating a bacteria sample caused the bacteria to die, and relativity came straight out of the mathematics (you can derive special relativity in about one sheet of A4 - general relativity is much harder). Is there some story that everyone except me knows about?

Einstein used to construct mental images, which often became the inspiration for his mathematical theories. For instance, a train traveling at c with a headlamp on the front...and somehow, the light from that is moving at c away from the train. From an external perspective, both the train and light beam are moving at c. Obviously, there's time dilation involved....at least, I was always told that he came up with that thought experiment.

Before Einstein started scribbling stuff down on paper, he performed "thought experiments" http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gedanken_experiment [wikipedia.org], which are like a form of visualization. For instance, while he was at the Swiss patent office in Bern, he started to try imaging what the world outside would look like, if the street tram he was riding in, was traveling at the speed of light. He imagined that if traveling away from a clock, the hand would never move from his perspective.

No cats were injured in Einstein's experiments.

I'll have to pass on the penicillin, although I regularly "visualize" a form of it in my breadbox every week.

They're actually fairly similar. You build a model governing a toy universe, and set it to motion from a given state. If the results look like what you see in the real world, that's evidence for the model's accuracy. I have no idea how Einstein intended to observe the time dialation effects at the speed of light, however.

To do the visualisation, you'd have to do a kind of thought experiment first - to decide what to display, how to display it etc. But the machine can't do the clever creative/imaginative bit for you. They're two differeent things.
IKIGMDFT, but it seems the fancy hardware is redundant. Another solution in search of a problem?

You can today, because people have picked it apart for over a century. People could have written it succinctly a hundred years ago, but they were still getting their heads around it. They didn't have nicely prepared lecture notes to work from.

So this is either a killer new research vehicle, an incredible toy, or just an insanely expensive art project.

It's entertainment! It sounds like a great source of revenue to me. Charge admission! Team up with The Discovery Channel and whip up some fascinating images with insightful commentary! Scientists love showing off their research to awed folks who can't really comprehend it.

I want one! I can't wait for the Slashdot article that describes how to make a cheap, open source version of this!

I recently visited the Morrison Planetarium at the California Academy of Sciences. It's a new facility with impressive technology (and cost).

However the presentation was all animation, moral harangues, and celebrity voiceover, with little content and no interesting astrophysics science. The whole concept seemed like a watered-down ripoff of the powers of ten video [powersof10.com] I saw in middle school. Remember that? I would much rather have watched that again.

Human beings only have about a 120 degree maximum field of view, so 360 degrees isn't that useful. It is easier to rotate the image into your field of view than to turn your head 360 degrees to see it all, IMHO.

Rotating the image into your field of view would destroy some of the spatial awareness of the data.

One of the points is for spatial awareness to more easily come into play when interpreting data.

Pretend you are a drug researcher, and you're working on developing analogues of naturally-occuring protein substrates. If you have a 360 model of the receptor site of the protein, being able to visualize the space your substrate fits into could help you identify possible analogues.

For an oversimplified example, look at epinephrine, which is a naturally occuring substance in the body that binds with adrenergic receptors and causes a response. Adding a methyl group in the right spot gives you a different compound that binds with adrenergic receptors more than epinephrine, but causes no response. Thus we have a compound that can be used as a drug to prevent that response. Or, maybe we can build a drug that increases the response.

Epinephrine drugs are well-understood... but there are many possible drugs that could be developed if we had better modeling and understanding of protein receptor sites. An encompassing 360 view of a receptor site could result in a breakthrough.

There are a ton of other ways this could be useful, that's just one example.

My guess is that it will be seen as an impressive technological feat, with marginal real applicability.

In the talk on "TED" JoAnn Kuchera-Morin, trumps the ability to fly into the brain, see the tissue as landscape and hear the blood density as sound. It is very unclear the advantage of the projection to the scale they've accomplished (other than to say we've done it).

They've pulled together impressive super-computer technology, but if it was on a larger PC screen versus a "walk-in" version, is there a real gain?

It sounds like a cool toy, but choosing the correct way to visualize data is really hard. Generally, picking which quantities to plot against each other corresponds to taking a lower dimensional slice of a data set. Picking the right slice isn't just difficult, it's a really important result of the research.

There have been lots of advances in trying to automatically determine these sorts of reductions (the Netflix recommendation contest brought a lot of this to public attention), but for many problems, the "interesting" lower-dimensional space that's plotted corresponds to some important symmetry of the data.

I guess what I'm saying is that in science (like in art) limitations sometimes help guide useful thinking. Just seeing "everything" in 3D 36 degrees with more dimensions represented as sound doesn't necessarily help that.

Honestly, it seems rather useless (in these examples). I won't knock music in general, but does a computer singing a song really going to be helpful in diagnosing something? Just because you have more information, doesn't mean you have any higher level of useful information.

I will give the presenter props though. That was like a Science Word Bingo caller going for blackout.

Yeah, penicillin required looking at a petri dish, but I'm not sure that counts as "visualization".

Einstein apparently was a visual thinker, but the emphasis there is on "thinking", not plotting, graphing, or other artifacts; visual thinking in mathematics is very different from 2D or 3D data visualizations.

So when do scientists plan on researching visualization hardware that is forward compatible so that we can observe 1:1 preview samples of the next generation of hardware. The article presented yet another video of an amazing visualization device that I cannot comprehend on my tiny computer display or my HD television set. At least on PBS they try to explain the future with diagrams depicting how it is suppose to work.

Tommy: Hey, I'll tell you what. You can get a good look at a butcher's ass by sticking your head up there. But, wouldn't you rather to take his word for it?Mr. Brady, Customer: [confused] What? I'm failing to make the connection here.Tommy: No, I mean is, you can get a good look at a T-bone by sticking your head up a butcher's ass... No, wait. It's gotta be your bull.Richard: [embarrassed] Wow.

Later in the movie:
[saying it correctly]Tommy: I can get a good look at a T-bone by sticking my head up a

I tried to watch the presentation but had to stop because of the nauseating stream of peseudo-technical nonsense that this woman is spewing.She's the "inventor of the Allosphere" - the "dynamically varying digital microscope" where the "researchers interact with data by injecting bacterial code" and defy quantum mechanics by showing "where the electron is at any given point in time and space".Why not just describe it for what it is - a spherical projection screen for visualizing scientific models.

There has been some interesting progress in visualizing some of the interesting (or spooky) quantum mechanical effects.
http://visualphysics.org [visualphysics.org]
The software which generates it is available for free. It uses mathematics based in Quaternions [wikipedia.org] to visualize the mathematics behind spacetime, standard model groups,etc.

CAVE-type displays (you're surrounded by rear-projected screens) have been around since 1992.
Mechdyne [mechdyne.com] (which bought FakeSpace) makes a number of variations on this theme. Their standard CURV display can be purchased in sizes up to a full hemisphere. A full sphere would be a custom order.

The new California Academy of Sciences building has a "planetarium" which is really a 75 foot dome equipped for full digital projection over slightly more than a hemisphere. There's a writeup in Maximum PC [maximumpc.com].

If 3D visualization is that helpful, is being immersed within the scene really that good of an idea?

Assuming they can avoid being goatse trolled, yes. Otherwise the thing will be burned down quickly.

A lot of 3d data doesn't really work well on flatscreens. I take confocal microscope images, there are plenty of tricks to convey the 3d, like causing my movies to wobble, but when there's a lot of noise it's tough to keep track of it. Maybe this would help. Of course, the images don't look really good when I blow them up to full monitor, at 30 feet they would become just downright ugly. I'm sure other ap

I just saw the vid and I was not impressed. I don't see how this offers you anything other than what essentially amounts to a giant monitor, unless you go through pains to condition your data to the Allosphere specifically... and I've got to imagine conditioning data at every iteration and every step of your analysis for one particular view inside an Allosphere is not worth it. The data almost certainly doesn't just know how to present itself on a 360 degree plane (I'm not a mathematician, but

Dr. Kuchera-Morin is primarily an artist. She's truly interested in doing what she says in her TED talk, which is bringing all disciplines together to share knowledge, but she originally imagined the Allosphere as the ultimate multimedia theater. The artistic computer music community (especially the people in the MAT program, which she directs) are heavily into spatialization using a large number of loudspeakers and the Allosphere will facilitate such art presentations. If scientists can get some use out

My company was on the design team for the AlloSphere. After listening to the ideas they wanted to express in this "venue" we took our planetarium experience and turned it on it's side. (pause for groans)
To help visualize/demonstrate the idea, we found an old globe lying around, cut it in half and glued an extra long scale rule in the middle as the audience platform.
While I can't speak to how they are using it today, at the time we conceived it it was pretty radical. We looked at all kinds of immerse t